It was the summer of 1962. I threw a slumber party in my parents' basement. I was 10 or 11 -- I don't remember whether it was before or after my birthday that year.
We lived in Grosse Pointe Woods, an upscale suburb just a little way from Lake St. Clair. After several hours of listening to my collection of 45s, talking about the boyfriends none of us had yet, eating pizza, drinking Coke and giggling, someone had the idea of riding our bikes down to the lake to watch the sun rise. It was about 3:30 a.m. and my parents were sound asleep. They wouldn't have let us step out of the house at that time of night if they'd had any idea what we were up to, but none of us had any fear of being out on the streets.
So, this little gaggle of 10 and 11-year-old girls took off on our bicycles and rode about a mile down to Lakeshore Drive, where there was a narrow strip of grass between the road and the lake. We sat down on the bank and the sun came up in all it's pearly pink glory. As it was getting light, we hopped back on our bikes and headed home.
Before we'd got more than a block from the lake, we were stopped by a police officer in his patrol car.
Nobody was shot. Nobody was frisked. Nobody was Tasered or handcuffed. Nobody was even hauled down to the station to have our parents called.
The officer said there had been a break-in in the area and he asked for our names, ages and home addresses. We told him what he wanted to know (polite little girls didn't refuse to give their names to the police in those days), he chuckled a little -- having decided that we didn't seem like a bunch of house breakers -- and sent us on our way.
Naturally, we were all white and none of us had any fear of police, because we'd been raised to believe the police were there to protect us.
I'm not sure that story would be anything like my memory today. My little story sounds a bit like a fairy tale. The idea of a group of 10- and 11-year-old girls out riding their bikes at 3:30 a.m. would make most parents turn pale today -- even in an upscale community like Grosse Pointe.
The officer who stopped my little gaggle of friends at around 4:30 a.m. undoubtedly retired decades ago. With him (and his peers) went a completely different philosophy of community policing.
A lot of white people still see the police through that old frame of "serve and protect." They grew up thinking of the cop on the beat as a part of the neighborhood family. He was the guy who would rush in and rescue you if something bad happened. He was only a threat to the "bad guys."
The change in police philosophy didn't happen over night. The police evolved. The streets got meaner, the police got meaner, the weapons got deadlier.
Ferguson was a wake-up call for a lot of people who may not have realized how different today's police officer is from the police they remember.
I'm essentially an optimist. I find it hard to believe that the majority of modern-day police officers are racist psychopaths who go out onto the street every day in search of minorities to bully, beat and murder.
I'm sure there are a couple of psychopaths in any group of people selected at random. And I don't have any trouble believing that law enforcement, as a career, would attract people who want to be able to order (or push) other people around. I did a stint as a base MP when I was in the military back in the early '70s. One of several enlisted people temporarily assigned to the base police, I got to know a number of the "career" officers. Some of them were bullies. The work suited them.
But I still don't believe the majority of our police officers are sociopaths. No more than they were in 1962.
Police work has never been particularly safe. The police officer has always been asked to step into dangerous situations. Even in the most peaceful suburbs, a domestic violence call could end in injury or death to the responding officer.
I think that police today are trained to be less polite and more "commanding" as a reaction (justified or not) to the inherent danger of the profession. I'm not sure it's the right way to be training them. It would be safer for everyone if police officers were trained to evaluate situations and use only the minimum force necessary.
I think our modern police officers are being trained to present such overwhelming force, from the very beginning of a contact, that (theoretically) nobody will resist them. But that just fosters fear, and terrified people often don't do the most logical thing. What is intended to tamp down violent resistance may be increasing it.
When you see a poll that says that a majority of white people think the police in Ferguson were justified in rolling out with assault weapons, tear gas and tanks, it's probably because the white mental image of a police officer is based on that officer I met when I was 10 or 11 years old. He was trained to use minimum force. He was unfailingly polite to people he stopped. He seldom unholstered his revolver, and if he fired it, he faced weeks of administrative leave and investigation of the circumstances.
Today, you have officers not even submitting an incident report after a shooting.
It has to change. The police have to stop killing the people they're supposed to protect.
It doesn't have to be this way.
A couple of years ago, I went to England on vacation. I rented a car when I arrived at Heathrow to drive from London to Stratford on Avon for some Shakespeare. I picked up that car in an exhausted haze after being awake for more than 24 hours because of some flight delays.
Here I am, in a country where they drive on the other side of the road, in one of the largest cities in the world, driving a car that I'm not familiar with. I got terribly lost and ended up driving the wrong way down a one way street. A London police patrol pulled me over and made me take a sobriety test.
I explained to them that I was an exhausted American, lost and panicking over not being able to find my way out to the freeway I needed to take to Stratford. They not only didn't arrest me, frisk me or give me a ticket, they led me out to the motorway and wished me good luck and have a nice holiday.
Can you imagine it happening that way if a foreigner got lost and stopped by the police in New York City?
Something has to change in our American police departments. Our police officers need to be retrained. They need to be schooled in manners. They need to revise their attitudes to understand that they serve all the people in their jurisdiction -- not just the white people. They need to learn how to effectively use minimum force.
And they need to get rid of all those damn tanks!